Sub-contractors and Home Inspections
Flipping Houses and Building Relationships with Sub-contractors
Developing and maintaining good relationships is essential to flipping houses successfully. My house flipping team of contractors, lawyers, real estate agents and various other people really are 100% essential to the success of my business.
Contractors in particular are an incredibly important piece to the puzzle. Having good working relationships with general contractors and sub-contractors is certainly an aspect of flipping houses that can’t be overlooked.
I’ve read a lot of Napolean Hill and Dale Carnegie books throughout my business career, and I highly recommend that you check them out. How to Win Friends and Influence People, written by Dale Carnegie is all about how to create and maintain good relationships. The skills Hill teaches in his book are the same skills I use on a daily basis when interacting with my sub-contractors.
We are currently putting the finishing touches on a local house renovation, and I’m happy to say that things are going great. However we did recently encounter a little bump in the road with an electrical inspection. To put it simply, the inspector came by the property, walked around the house on his own, and found numerous areas in the home that he was not happy with.
Subsequently the house failed the inspection.
Unfortunately my electrician was not able to take the tour of the home with the inspector. In my opinion, if my electrician was able to show the home to the inspector, he may have been able to “smooth over” the inspector’s areas of concern.
We are planning, of course, to take care of all the things the inspector pointed out. Had my electrician been present during the inspection, my electrician could have explained to him why certain things were left as they were. My electrician is a great guy, and I’m confident that if he was present, we would not have failed the inspection.
In my opinion, not having someone there at the time of inspection is a little disrespectful and unfair to the inspector.
In addition, failing the inspection threatened to set us back a full week. Obviously being set back a week would impact the rest of the house flipping renovation, and cost me a fair amount of money. I’m hoping to sell this particular home quickly, so it’s important to avoid as many of these “bumps in the road” as possible.
As I mentioned before, I have a great working relationship with my electrician. I called him up and asked him to contact the home inspector immediately – which he did. He arranged a convenient time that worked for the home inspector, and they met up and went through the house again. This time my electrician was able to fully explain our plans, and why certain things were as they were.
Guess what happened? We passed the inspection!
Rarely does a renovation go 100% as planned. You will always run into challenges and unexpected problems.
However having a great team on your side makes the rehabbing process so much easier. I cannot overemphasize how important maintaining good relationships is in the house flipping business.
Have a great day and see you at the top!
Mike
